Hilton, who was one of the original partners selected to share ad revenues with the site (a program that was recently opened up) found his account temporarily shut down on Monday for purported copyright violations. YouTube had received a takedown notice related to Liza Minnelli concert footage he had included in a video. It was the third takedown notice that Hilton’s videos had received. However, Hilton says he had permission to post the video from the person who shot it. YouTube quickly reinstated his account.

Nevertheless, Hilton expressed anger at YouTube for sending him a standard, generic e-mail informing him of his account’s violation and temporary shutdown. Don’t they know who he is? They should, his YouTube videos generate millions of views, according to him. Doesn’t he rate at least a phone call? In his farewell video, Hilton tells his fans he probably won’t be posting any more videos to YouTube and that neither should they. Dis.

But here’s the funny part. The other two takedown notices had come from Viacom, which produces Hilton’s TV show on VH1. He had to get his lawyer to contact Viacom’s lawyers to rescind the notices, which sound like they were automatically generated. These automated takedown notices are just going to keep backfiring on Viacom and other media companies that use them too liberally.

The fact is that Hilton got caught up in the middle of a war between YouTube and Viacom, one in which the weapons are software-generated takedown notices, software-generated e-mails, and software-generated account closures. He is not the only casualty. He is just the most vocal. But he should be just as angry at Viacom, who arguably started this war with its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube in the first place.

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CrunchBase

OverviewYouTube is a video-sharing website created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
YouTube enables users to upload, view and share videos. It uses Adobe Flash video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including video clips, TV clips, music videos, haber, and amateur content such as video blogging, short …